Monthly Archives: March 2011

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In the same bug report, Johannes Schmid proposed to add placeholder text to GtkCellrendererText too, and I think it makes even more sense than for entries since it’s not obvious when a treeview cell is editable. Glade has a custom implementation for the signal editor. I filed a new bug report and attached a patch.

GtkScrolledWindow: kinetic scrolling

While I was on vacation I had the opportunity to play with an Android phone for a while (thanks Roca!), I was very curious about how they solved the problem of selecting text in scrollable widgets and it turned out that they use press-and-hold. After a long press the current word is selected and two handles show up to extend the selection. I don’t like the handles, and I don’t think we need it, but the press-and-hold solution might work for us. We can simply wait after the long press to cancel the scrolling operation and propagate events to child widgets normally so that both selections and drag and drop operations will work as if kinetic scrolling mode were not enabled. I submitted a patch that uses press-and-hold to allow selections and drag and drop operations when kinetic scrolling mode is enabled in GtkScrolledWindow. However, I couldn’t use any of the solutions proposed for press-and-hold in bug #315645. As kriscommented (thanks kris for your feedback in this and other bugs, by the way!), this press-and-hold use case changes the game a bit, so we’ll have to think a bit more about it.

GtkLiveEntry

I noticed my patch had a couple of regressions regarding GtkEntry popdown menu handling, corresponding to old bugs #169534 and #71868. Updated the patches (GtkLiveEntry and GtkTreeView) to apply on current git master and fix the regressions.

It’s unclear to me whether we really need a new signal for this, or we can just synthesize right click events after the long press. So, I’ve reworked the patch to do the latter, showing the same animation and sending a right click event only when the toucscreen mode is enabled (GtkSettings:gtk-touchscreen-mode). Instead of using the touchscreen setting, we could get the source device of the button press event to enable press-and-hold only when it’s originated by a stylus or the finger, but there’s not a GdkInputSource for the finger yet.

GtkEntry:placeholder-text

Company reviewed my patch and pointed out that we could use a single pango layout instead of having one for the main entry text and another one for the hint text. Both texts are never shown at the same time, so it should be possible to use a single pango layout. He also proposed to rename it to placeholder-text, which is the name used in maemo indeed. So, I rewrote the patch addressing both issues.

API also commented on the bug regarding the GailEntry patch. In order to make sure the placeholder text is always available for the a11y system, no matter whether there’s a tooltip text or not, API suggested to use the AtkObject attributes instead of the description, adding a new attribute for the placeholder text. I reworked the GailEntry patch to do exactly that.

I rewrote the patch to explicitely add the hint text instead of using the tooltip text as suggested by Matthias. Also wrote a patch for GailEntry to return the hint text as ATK object description only when there isn’t a description nor a tooltip text, as APIproposed. However, Joanmarie thinks the hint text should always be exposed via the description.

GtkLiveSearch

I finished the patch to add the new widget GtkLiveEntry that works like the current search window used in GtkTreeView. I also wrote patches for GtkTreeView, Evince and Nautilus to use GtkLiveEntry instead of their own implementations. Now it’s time to think about the other part of GtkLiveSearch, the search stuff.